Iowa lawmakers are considering changes to the 14-year-old law requiring criminal background checks of nursing home workers.
A bill that has the support of both state regulators and the nursing home industry would streamline the background check process. Currently, applicants for nursing home jobs undergo an online background check that takes only a few seconds. If that initial check turns up no evidence of past criminal activity — felonies, serious misdemeanors, aggravated misdemeanors and a few simple misdemeanors — or abuse, the applicant can be hired on the spot.
http://liarcatchers.com/background_checks.html
If the initial check indicates a problem of some kind, the state begins a weeklong process of double-checking the person’s history and then evaluating that history to determine whether the offenses are so serious or recent that the applicant should be barred from working in an Iowa care facility.
The industry has complained that under the current law, applicants’ past offenses must be re-evaluated every time an individual is hired at a new care facility. That’s true even in cases where the applicants were previously cleared by the state to work in a care facility and subsequently committed no additional offenses.
Legislation now being considered by the House and Senate would eliminate those types of re-evaluations.
Kelly Meyers, a lobbyist with the Iowa Health Care Association says the industry is in favor of mandatory background checks, but wants to eliminate redundancies.
“We do not want to weaken the system in any way,” she told lawmakers at a Government Oversight Committee meeting Thursday. “We want to make it more efficient.”
Meyers said that unlike Iowa, Wisconsin allows homes to provide conditional employment to applicants whose backgrounds are still under review by the state.
According to the Iowa Department of Human Services, the state’s nursing homes and other employers ran 231,000 initial background checks on job applicants last year. Roughly 22 percent of the checks indicated some type of history related to crimes or abuse. In most of those cases, the employer chose not to pursue the hiring, but in 7,365 cases, the state was asked to evaluate the applicant’s history.
The department says that in 2011, 159 of the job applicants who underwent background checks had a past finding of dependent adult abuse.
Some Government Oversight Committee members expressed support for a waiver process that allows nursing homes to immediately hire applicants whose initial background check triggers a state evaluation of the person’s history.
Sen. Sandra Greiner, a Keota Republican, told committee members that a small-town nursing home in her district had to wait several days for the state to evaluate a job applicant even though there was an immediate and “desperate need” for additional workers to care for residents.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Greiner said. “The administrator called me, totally frustrated, because she was required to do a background check on a young woman who was applying to be a nurse’s aide. She had baby-sat that girl when the girl was 3 years old. She had taught the girl Sunday school. I mean, it’s a small community. There is no way on God’s green earth that this kid could have messed up anywhere without the whole town knowing, let alone the nursing home administrator. … Once again, state government appears to be solving a problem that isn’t always there.”
Greiner said nursing home administrators who “unequivocally know” that job applicants have no history of abuse or criminal activity should be entitled to a waiver that allows them to hire applicants without waiting for a state evaluation.
Vern Armstrong, administrator for the Department of Human Services’ Field Division, told Greiner that under the existing system, applicants who have a clean record, with no history of abuse or criminal activity, can be hired on the spot since the initial check takes a few seconds. Delays occur only when the record check indicates a history that requires further investigation by the state, he said.
Sen. Jack Kibbe, an Emmetsburg Democrat, agreed with Greiner.
“You’ve got this (applicant) in this small town who everybody knows, and I would think there would be a waiver process or a probation period where that person would be allowed to work,” he said.
Sen. Tom Courtney, a Burlington Democrat, expressed some reluctance to grant waivers on the basis of a person’s reputation in town, pointing out that “whenever there’s a mass murderer, everybody who knew him always says, ‘He seemed like such a great guy.’ ”
The law requiring background checks was approved in 1997 amid concerns that caregivers working in eastern Iowa nursing homes had faced charges for murder, assault, burglary, theft, terrorism and other crimes.
